About me

Intro

Hi, my name is Yolan(he/him) and I’m a Belgian nerd who put his roots down in Helsinki, Finland. I got my start as a programmer in Belgium working as a full-stack Java Consultant at the FedEx IT headquarters in Brussels.

The before times

After moving to Helsinki to be with my now wife, I got my sideways entry into the games industry as a backend Java developer at Easy AntiCheat. Which later got bought by Epic Games to become Epic Games Helsinki. There I made and maintained several backend tools the anticheat developers used to find cheaters. I never personally banned anyone but the systems I maintained and developed allowed the anticheat developers to set up a large part of the automated detections.

I learned a lot at EAC/EGH and have a lot of fond memories and some of my closest friends to this day are from that time in my life. Coming from FedEx I was used to requirements being regurgitated from upstream and implementing them without question. At EAC I had to learn to tell my de facto team lead and even the founders that their suggestions were in line with how it was back when they maintained the system but didn’t make a lick of sense within the current context. It was quite a culture shock and a defining moment in my growth as a developer.

It was common to ban your own accounts to test changes to the systems, there wasn’t much automated… anything at the time, let alone testing. Once during a particularly rough bug-hunting session due to a combination of stress, caffeine and tiredness, I entered a slightly delirious state, which I’m sure many developers have experienced. At some point my ban messages devolved from “test 1” “test 2” etc into things like “Screw you buddy” and “Die cheater scum”. Little did I know that the game I was testing on forwarded the ban messages to one of the developers’ Slack channels. Queue the small panic attack when I was told the next day. Luckily they had a sense of humor and they struck it up to me being new at the time. Oh yeah, and the same week I pushed a bad update to our edge system and made all games unplayable for a solid hour. So to all you juniors out there, we’ve all blown up production over the course of our career… sometimes even repeatedly.

The lean cool startup life is not all that

I left Epic Games at the depth of what I now know was the biggest burnout of my adult life. The silver lining is that it started me on the road that would see me get my ADHD diagnosis and work on my mental health. I witnessed firsthand the pros and cons of the “go fast and break things” startup life. Nowadays I think of it as an overcorrection. No one wants to make the next corporate hellscape that everyone dreads to work at. So they swing too far in the other direction which has its own issues and drawbacks. At least we had really good coffee, a stocked (and later on locked) liquor cabinet and a pingpong table. It’s unfortunate that my time at Epic ended in what I am contractually obligated to call Clears throat a mutual termination agreement.

Working on a game! with SVN -_-”

After Epic Games Helsinki I started at EA Track20 as a backend and web tools developer for the mobile game SimCity: BuildIt. My first time working at an actual studio. I was very excited to work on the actual games themselves instead of on the peripheries of them. It also helped that EA T20 has a good name in Helsinki, had great benefits and the backend interview process was exactly how I prefer them to be. Granted that I would be working on mobile games which I don’t play much of myself. With some exceptions like Threes and Minimetro which I use mostly as ADHD Stims and Vampire Survivors which is just an absolute time sucker.

Being a part of a team that makes and delivers high-quality game content was an experience like no other. There is a lot to be said about what makes game development different from other forms of software development. I usually use a banking app as the polar opposite to game development in the software space. Working closely with so many people from disparate fields and specialties to make a cohesive experience is fascinating. It’s what reinforced the idea that games are absolutely the things I want to work on for the foreseeable future. Games exist at the intersection of art, software and product like nothing else out there. Each game and by extension game studio has its own blend of these three pillars.

But I also learned there how the way our industry makes games is just kind of broken. My go-to example is how many game developers still use Perforce and SVN over Git which is bonkers from my perspective. Git is the standard across the software development world for all of the very obvious benefits it provides. One of the most frustrating experiences of my development career was seeing a lead game client developer sandbag, and ultimately kill, the switch from SVN to Git for their game code. This is after we showed them in excruciating detail how it had benefited us in the backend team for the last six months or so. “Yeah not needing to have a meeting after meeting just about branching and merging is nice but there’s been that network hiccup every few days that makes pushing changes slow… That’s a show-stopper for me” Yolan proceeds to pull out his hair despite his already receding hairline

Backend lead is pretty fun

Towards the summer of 2022, I started to look at my options outside of EA and Helsinki. The pandemic had pushed even the most reluctant company to adopt remote work. So after a few interviews, I ended up as the backend lead for a small studio in Denmark called Funday Factory, now called Funday Games if I’m not mistaken. They had one full-time backend dev and a client dev who was interested in moonlighting on the backend side of things. I was tasked with taking their disparate backend efforts and making them into a backend team. The focus was mostly on their instant games division that made games for SnapChat, cool I didn’t even know there were games on SnapChat. They had this interesting setup where the backend developer on the instant games team delivered his code changes and SnapChat did all the infrastructure and hosting, weird but kind of cool. Fast forward to my second week of getting up to speed when SnapChat dropped the bombshell announcement that they’re closing down all of games section.

So now my mandate changed from “Make us a backend team” to “Make us a backend team and a full backend stack” Which is exactly what we did. They had never hosted their own systems so we got started on making things run in Docker on GCP deployed through our own GitLab runners. My development work was in essence filling in the gaps of what the team hadn’t done before. Usually by making a small proof of concept and using it as a base to introduce it to the guys. It was pretty cool to see what we got done after such a hard pivot, with so few people, in such a small amount of time.

After a while, it was clear that we needed to pivot away from multiplayer entirely so we expanded our focus on the second pillar of most backend teams in the games industry. Namely web tools. This went great initially I love talking to artists, analysts, game designers, etc. to figure out what is keeping them from doing their job to the fullest potential and coming up with solutions. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing a process or flow of information other times an off-the-shelf software solution will get the job done. And if all else fails developing something ourselves in-house and iterate on it together. But at the end of the summer of 2023 due to some financial hiccups on their end, it was deemed untenable to keep a team around for just internal web tooling and carrying over learnings between projects.

Around the same time my wife and I got to welcome our first child into our family. Since then I’ve taken it slow to enjoy the time I have with our new born daughter. That brings us to the start of 2024 where I’m writing this blog post,

I hope that gives you an insight into who I am and how I got to where I am today.